


By Way of California

by twobirdsonesong



Category: CrissColfer - Fandom, Glee RPF
Genre: Emotional Baggage, Established Relationship, Glee is over, M/M, Moving, RPF, Road Trips, crisscolfer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-04
Updated: 2014-10-04
Packaged: 2018-02-19 21:57:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2404319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twobirdsonesong/pseuds/twobirdsonesong
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It takes a week to move Darren across the country, and about the same for Chris.</p>
            </blockquote>





	By Way of California

**Day One – 600 Miles**

They hit the road at 5:36am and they stop at a Starbucks at 5:42. Chris stays in the car, slouched low in the seat and barely awake, while Darren wanders in through the back door with just a bit too much spring to his step.  He hadn’t really slept much the night before, but it doesn’t matter.  There’s always energy enough left when he needs it.

He comes back with a bag full of snacks and guiltily brushing crumbs from his shirt. Chris rolls his eyes, but Darren just grins over the cup of his tea.  It’s too warm for a September morning, but there’s still steam rising from their cups as Darren pulls out of the parking lot and back onto the street.

The roads in and out of Los Angeles are never truly empty, but at this hour there are more people heading into the city than there are leaving and Darren speeds along, heading north and east and towards the rising sun.

It's too early to really talk, with fractured sleep still heavy in their veins, but Darren has so much to say. Mostly he wants to know why Chris agreed to come on this drive with him, given where they’re headed.  It's going to take a short week to get where they're going, maybe less if they don't stop at all (but he knows he’s going to want to stop and see some of the world along the way, to chip away at the things he hasn’t yet seen), and it's not like Chris is the one moving. 

Chris’ purpose in the passenger seat is something else all together.  Darren’s just not completely sure what.

 

All of Darren's stuff – including his other car – is packed up into a moving van and making its way east as well. Two small suitcases sit nestled in the truck of the car with a pair of laptops tucked carefully in between.  Darren hopes neither of them has to turn on their computers along the way.  He’s already had his life’s fill of obligations.

California seems to stretch on forever – the desert dusty and flat – even though Darren knows how narrow the state really is.  It doesn’t help that the road is going to take them north before it begins to move them east.  He tries not to count the mileposts and fails.  When they finally cross the border into Nevada, Darren glances in the rear view mirror – the road behind is the same as the one ahead and Darren presses down on the gas a little harder.

 

At the first pit stop Chris gets out of the car to stretch his legs while Darren puts gas in the tank and Darren watches Chris quietly clean the road dust off the windshield.

“Thanks,” he says and Chris smiles gently at him over the hood of the car.

There isn’t much to see, just desert and rock and the sparse straggling things struggling to grow through the drought-packed ground.  It doesn’t feel like what it is – this drive – not then.  It feels like maybe they’re just going to Las Vegas for a weekend, or somewhere just a bit further for a longer escape from the world behind them.  But that’s not what this drive is at all.  Darren doesn’t have to remind himself of that when there’s an emptied-out house in the state behind him and an empty apartment waiting ahead.

But somehow it’s easy – the hours disappear under the rough hum of the tires against the pavement and Chris’ softly pitched voice.  And Darren doesn’t have to pretend for long that there’s still time to turn back.

“When do you want to stop for the night?” Darren asks.  It isn’t dark yet, but the sky is softening and dimming as the sun begins its descent behind them.

“Whenever you want to,” Chris responds.  He is loose and relaxed next to him, thighs parted and long legs stretched out as far as there’s room.

“What if I just keep on driving? All through the night?”

Chris doesn’t turn towards him, eyes still on some unknown point in the distance, but his elbow is easy on the console between them. “Well, I’m in this car with you,” he says and Darren’s chest is so tight it hurts.  “I’m with you however long you go.”

**Day Two – 26 Hours**

Darren wakes drooling into his pillow, shivering where the rickety AC is blasting frigid air against his bared skin and sweating where Chris’ back is pressed up against his naked side.  He stretches, twisting to look at the clock and frowning at the early hour.

The motel is just off the interstate exit and they’d fallen into bed quickly after checking into the room, exhaustion from the road setting in as soon as they’d stepped out of the car.  The curtains smell of stale smoke even though the room is marked as non-smoking and Darren is pretty sure the window doesn’t actually open.  Chris had wrinkled his nose at the state of the lobby and raised an eyebrow when the front desk had told them how much the room was going to be for the night.

“That’s for two beds,” the young woman had pointed out and Darren had signed his name, trying not to smirk to broadly.

The second bed sits unused next to the window.

They don’t have a schedule, but Darren isn’t going to lie to himself that he’s growing ever more eager to get to where he’s going as fast as possible.  He’d thought he’d want to site-see along the way, but he’s already itching to get moving.  Every mile they put behind them is another mile closer.

Darren rolls out of bed and shuffles into the bathroom, grabbing his clothes and a threadbare towel.  The shower pressure is surprisingly good and Darren lingers, leaning against the bowed, tiled wall and not listening for the bathroom door to open.

Chris is still asleep when Darren comes out of the shower, wrapped up in the covers that Darren had cast aside.  Sitting on the edge of the bed, Darren gently taps Chris’ arm.

“Chris, c’mon.”

Chris’ brow scrunches. “Nhgg.”

Darren grins.  “It’s time to get up.  The breakfast is open.”  As much as he wants to sit and loiter at a diner, he doesn’t want to waste time.  His hands are ready for the steering wheel and his foot the gas pedal.

“What breakfast?” Mumbles Chris, turning towards him.  The sheet stretches across his hips and Darren blinks.

“Downstairs. The hotel breakfast.”

Chris shakes his head.  “I’m not going down there,” he grumbles and Darren frowns.

“Why not?  It’s free – comes with the room.” Darren runs his fingers down Chris’ arm, touching the freckles at his shoulders and feeling the soft hairs.  “Come on, I’m hungry and I want to get back on the road.”

“I don’t want to.” Chris’ voice is as petulant as it’s ever been and it hits Darren all at once.

He draws back, staring down at Chris who is a tightly curled ball in their starched, rumpled motel room sheets.

“Fine,” Darren grits out, his chest tight.  He leaves the room, shoving a key in his back pocket and not looking back when the door clicks closed behind him.

The breakfast area just off the lobby is small, but tidy, and Darren nods hello to the woman refreshing the coffee urns.  The plates are paper and the coffee cups Styrofoam and Darren loves it.  He piles eggs and greasy sausage and a warm biscuit on a plate too small to hold it all and finds an open table.

A man with weary shoulders sits near the window, nursing a cup of coffee and picking a bagel that looks like it might have seen better mornings. Tapping away on her phone is a young woman ignoring both her mother and her bowl of yogurt, and an older couple in matching t-shirts bickers over a ragged map.  Darren glances at the empty chair across from him, thinking about the map that’s tucked into the glove box of the car, and tries not to feel bitter about he things he cannot change.

But he still brings Chris a banana – the least ripe one he could find – and a bagel when he comes back to the room, leaving them on the nightstand while he jumps into the shower for a second time in half an hour.  Chris is sitting up nibbling at the bagel when Darren steps out of the steamy bathroom and his eyes are softly grateful.  Darren breathes in.

The car is quiet again and Darren can see Chris’ hands fisted on his thighs.  He wants to say something to break the stillness but it’s not his turn to apologize.  Utah melts into Colorado as the greenery begins to take over from the rocks and plateaus.  He wonders how people can live out here, miles and miles from anything at all.  It takes a different kind of man than he to live that kind of life.

“Are you hungry?” Darren asks, when he catches a glimpse at the time on the dashboard.  He knows that Chris didn’t have the same breakfast he did, though it’s no fault of his.

“I could eat,” Chris agrees and Darren can hear the contrition in his voice that no one else could pick out.  His hands loosen on the steering wheel.

Darren takes the next exit and ends up driving through the center of a shockingly idyllic small town.  From LA to New York, he’s forgotten that these places still exist in the space between, where life slows down and friends are neighbors and a meal is a sacrament.

They eat at a little sandwich and pizza place that seems to be one of the few actual restaurants in town.  Outside a couple men discuss the weather and the new windows one of the shops recently had installed.

“Restaurant is a little generous, don’t you think?” Chris whispers as they come through the front door, but Darren just nudges him with his elbow.

 

Wooden stools are pulled up to a counter where a woman sits with a newspaper and a milk shake and the man making the pizzas behind the counter knows everyone’s name and Darren loves this too.

“You need to eat a peach before you leave,” the man tells him as Darren brings their trays up to the front and Darren cannot argue with that.

There are peach stalls everywhere in this small town.  Darren pulls into the gravel parking lot of a big pink house because, well, big pink house.

A woman with grey hair and a juice-stained apron greets them with a smile that says no one is a stranger to her.  She shows them crates and crates of peaches, each one perfectly ripe and sweetly golden and Darren picks out a half a dozen and Chris chooses half a dozen more.

After they pay, Darren pulls Chris around the shadowed back of the house, taking his hips in his hands and pressing him up against the pink-painted clapboard wall for a peach-stained kiss.

**Day Three – 5 Tanks of Gas**

Sometime between another spare selection of cold bagels at the continental breakfast and getting into the car in the parking lot of another drab motel something goes wrong.

Darren can feel the mood shift even has he unlocks the door of the dusty car and slips behind the wheel. He doesn't even try to ask Chris if he wants to drive for a while.  He can feel the cold under Chris’ warm skin.

The car is silent under the constant low rumble of the tires and the engine. Darren hasn't even tried turning the radio on, even though the most annoying morning DJ would still be better than this awful, trembling quiet. He doesn't need Chris to say a thing to know that he's pissed.  He can tell but the way Chris' shoulders are hunched in and how he's staring resolutely out of the passenger side window, breathing shallowly.  The tension is filling the air and Darren's chest is so tight and he doesn’t understand.

Darren wants to ask: “What? What just happened?" But he knows the terse and final answer will be "nothing."  And there’s no point to that.  Not anymore.

 

Chris does not speak to him until they go to bed that night, crawling under the cold sheets of another stiff bed in another cheap hotel room.  The stillness is made loud by the constant travel of trucks on the interstate just beyond the windows.

"Don't go," Chris whispers into the dark, so softly Darren almost misses it.  He’s missed a lot of thing Chris has said before.

Darren rolls over, towards Chris' tense back and places a gentle hand on Chris' naked arm. His skin is cool but his muscles tight and Chris does not turn around. 

Darren does not have a response for him. He will not change his mind and he cannot ask Chris to stay with him in New York.  Even if he wanted to, even though he's thought about it, he cannot ask that.  He’s run short on his allotted currency of questions.

But perhaps Darren will have answer for him in the light of the morning.

**Day Four – Twelve Rest Stops**

Chris takes the keys away from him before he’s completely awake, digging them out of the pocket of Darren’s jeans.

“My turn,” he says, voice soft but brooking no arguments.  Darren just slides into the passenger seat that smells of Chris’ shampoo and sinks down.

Somehow Chris manages to tune to a radio station that isn’t playing NPR or country and Darren hums along to songs he knows by heart and tries to get Chris to harmonize with him.  It strikes him then, in a way it hasn’t before, that they don’t sing together often, not they way he thinks they could have.  His home in San Francisco was always filled with music for someone or somewhere; his house on the edges of the Hollywood Hills echoed when he walked and not even Chris could fill it.  The times when Chris was there.

The endless grain of Nebraska slides into Iowa and Darren doesn’t remember what the road looks like without fields upon fields of corn golden along the edge.  He thinks about Los Angeles and its own fields of concrete and grime and wants to roll the windows down to breathe what must be fresh air.

Darren rubs his fingertips against the grain of his week-old beard.  “I don’t want to have to leave,” he allows.

The silence that follows stretches into the next state.

The road they’re on takes them through Illinois but does not lead them to Chicago.  Above them a sign says the city is approaching, 100 miles away if they dare, but Chris stays in his lane and the exit passes away into the distance.  If he looks back on it, Darren is pretty sure his last chance for that particular road faded long ago.

 

At a gas station 15 miles from anything, Darren ends up in a heated conversation about college football with three gruff men who were stood gathered around the coffee station.

“No, but this is  _their_  Super Bowl,” a blue-eyed man in a Buckeyes cap is saying with religious vehemence when Darren feels Chris approaching.  He can’t see him, but he knows he’s there and it’s an easy weight settling in his chest.

He stifles a smile at the soft, hidden pressure against his lower back – Chris’ fingers through his shirt letting him know he’s there as though Darren doesn’t always know. Chris doesn’t say anything, just lets Darren chat with these guys about defensive linebackers and bowl contention and Darren loves him just that little bit more for it.  Even if he never meant to.

**Day Five – Fourteen Meals**

They could make it to Darren’s new apartment by nightfall, but they don’t.  They stop in a quaint little town on the eastern edge of Pennsylvania long before nightfall.  It’s the kind of place where the main street is Main Street and it lasts all of six blocks before the businesses become homes and sidewalks become yards.  Shivering families and couples eat at tiny tables outside of cafés for what is the likely one of the last evenings before it gets to be too cold for it.

Darren does not take Chris’ hand as they walk down the street, but he wants to.  His fingers find his pockets so they don’t search for Chris’ wrist.  Their final motel is a mile up the road, across from two gas stations and a chain restaurant, so they walk into the town instead of spending any more time in the cat. The concierge had given them stern directions to a place for dinner and Darren didn’t question it.

“Are you sure this is it?” Chris asks when they turn down an empty back alley.

“It’s what he said.”  Not that Darren is sure of a whole lot anymore.  But there on the left is a little parking lot filled with cars and a sign proclaiming the place open.  And Darren catches the smell of French fries.

Inside it’s dark, but clean and a small stage glows under a blue light. If the hostess recognizes them, she doesn’t say anything, but she does take them upstairs to an empty room.  TVs on the wall are playing old  _Soul Train_  videos and Darren knocks his feet against Chris’ under the table.

“This okay?”  He asks and Chris just smiles at him from over his menu.

 

Afterwards, they wind their back to the motel through the backstreets. Tall trees line the sidewalks, leaves just beginning to loose their green and gain a touch of orange, and the houses are painted ludicrously quaint pastels.  Too many of them have white picket fences and shuttered windows and Darren is certain that come the winter, the sweet scent of wood smoke will fill the air.  He’s missed that.  There’s a cool wind picking up and Darren clenches his fists to keep from taking Chris’ hand.

“Do you think you could settle down someplace like this?” Chris asks.  Across the way a woman is plucking the last dying bulbs off some summer roses. Darren blinks and sees his growing family and his own new home and what things he might ever grow there.

"Do you think  _you_  could settle down at all?” Darren counters and he can hear the breath Chris takes.

“I guess it depends.  Here?  No.”  Darren can’t imagine Chris out of the convenience of a city.  “But somewhere else?  Maybe – it depends.”

“On what?”

"Well,” and Chris’ voice is pitched low and private, as honest as Darren has ever heard it.  “On you.”

Darren swallows so harshly it hurts and tugs his hand out of his pocket, blindly reaching for Chris’.  He cannot look over at him, not just then, but he can squeeze Chris’ familiar fingers between his own and let himself believe.

**Day Six – One Possible Ending**

The movers haven’t yet arrived with the rest of his stuff when Darren pulls up to his new apartment in a quiet neighborhood in the Upper East Side.  He’d thought about Brooklyn, but this is better for him.  He’s close enough to his brother now that it satisfies something he didn’t know was restless.

It was a short drive from the edge of Pennsylvania to here, but Darren’s legs are cramped from the last 3000 miles and he welcomes getting out of the car so soon.  He can see Chris stepping out and stretching, hands supporting his back as he twists, staring up at the tall building.

“What floor are you again?”

“The top.”  It was the one available in the neighborhood he wanted.

“Penthouse?” Chris squints.

Darren grins.  “Doesn’t have one.”

The doorman knows who he is and nods politely at them as they pass through the first set of doors.  They’ll bring their stuff upstairs and then move the car into the garage once Darren gets the garage opener from the super.  Darren has two spots reserved for him, but he doesn’t know if he’ll end up keeping either of them.  Those are decisions for another day.

Darren catches Chris watching the lights on the panel in the elevator as they go up and up to the top floor that is now Darren’s home and he knocks his elbow into Chris’ side.  Chris turns and his smile reaches his eyes even if it barely turns his mouth.

The door to Darren’s apartment is at the end of the hall, away from the elevator, and it seems to take forever to get to it.  There’s no welcome mat, but Darren thinks he’ll get one.  Maybe even tomorrow.  Pausing with his suitcase at his side, Darren glances at the still-locked door and then at the key in his hand.

He doesn’t know if Chris booked a return flight back to LA or not.  He never asked.

Darren rubs the sharp teeth of the new key with his thumb.  “Do you want to come in?”

_Will you stay?_

Next to him, Chris breathes in and exhales, slow and steady.  He nods.


End file.
